


Another Round

by hollybibble



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Boys Kissing, Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 06:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19883224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollybibble/pseuds/hollybibble
Summary: “You can stay for another round, if you want to,” Alex offers.After their first hook up, Alex invites Henry to stay a little longer. What if Henry said yes?An alternate beginning where their relationship hits the fast track.





	Another Round

**Author's Note:**

> I've spent far too much time thinking about this one line in the book, so I did the only sensible thing and wrote a fic. Hope you enjoy!

_“You can stay for another round, if you want to,” Alex offers._

HENRY  
Henry ponders the offer. 

His first instinct is to leave. The invitation is maddeningly careless and offhand, like Alex is inviting him to binge another Netflix episode or have a second gin and tonic. It is safer to retreat, extract himself from these tangled sheets and buzzing in his brain caused by such proximity to Alex Claremont-Diaz. 

But Alex is sprawled on the bed next to him, propped up on one elbow with careless confidence like [ Michaelangelo’s Adam. ](http://www.italianrenaissance.org/michelangelo-creation-of-adam/) He is so unselfconsciously naked that Henry can hardly believe that he ever wears clothes, evidence crumpled on the floor notwithstanding. It hasn’t even been ten minutes since Henry’s mouth was all over his body, and already he is raking Alex over with his eyes. 

Alex raises his eyebrows, waiting for an answer. “Weighing your options, man? Prime Minister Atherton is staying in the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor and might be open to company, but it’s pretty drafty in there and the water pressure is shit.”

Henry guffaws. He can’t help it. His body is still loose and content, sinking into Alex’s too-soft mattress. On the one hand, it’s infuriating—Alex’s casual offer, his condescending warning that Henry shouldn’t spend the night. But for once Henry doesn’t care. For years, he’s watched everything he’s said or done around Alex, and, well, perhaps he gets a night off.

“Why not?” Henry turns over on his stomach and props his chin in his hands to look at Alex. “If you’re this saucy again already, clearly I didn’t do my job.”

ALEX  
Alex is surprised to hear himself inviting Henry to stay. He still doesn’t have control of his arms and legs, let alone his fucking mouth. But he sensed Henry starting to withdraw, turning into the cardboard cutout he used to think was the real thing, and Alex just can’t bear it. 

Another round. What a fucking stupid thing to say. But Henry was still here. That was what he wanted, right?

Alex grins at Henry, who is giving him a lofty and appraising look. Like a true prince. 

“OK, your highness,” he says. “Let me rock your world one more time and send you safely back to the royal quarters.”

Alex wonders when they will see each other again, when they will kiss and touch each other again, after tonight. Friends with blow jobs was a thing, right?

HENRY  
“So we can do this again, anytime you want,” Alex said to him just after the first time. Part of Henry had thrilled to hear those words. Though surely both of them knew that would never happen. Was Henry supposed to invite Alex as his date to the polo match in Greenwich later that month, and then pull down his pants in the tack room when hopefully no one was looking? Did they think they were going to sneak off to Paris for a romantic weekend, or have phone sex in their respective ornate beds? Ridiculous.

This was the only time he and Alex would be together like this, and he was going out in a blaze of glory. Alex had taunted him in public since they were teenagers, then started calling him at all hours of the night to _talk_ and be ridiculous about gobbling turkeys and share his innermost feelings. Alex thought of them as friends now and would no doubt be horrified if he realized how closely Henry watched him. Henry knew when Alex got a new tie, when he went on a date, where he went on vacation. 

He knew what Alex looked like in private, with his glasses on. How much he loved June. How he wanted to help his mother and please his father. How much he gave of himself to everyone without asking for anything in return. And now Henry knew how he had a spray of freckles on his shoulders and a light trail of hair down from his navel.

Henry is a longtime student of Alex Claremont-Diaz, and tonight is the final exam.

ALEX  
“So, uh, what’s the royal refractory period anyway? Do you guys have some kind of superpowers to produce all of those heirs?” The silence makes Alex itchy, with Henry thoughtfully gazing at him sprawled on the bed. Suddenly he remembers that he is very naked.

Henry rolls his eyes. “You are the crassest thing I have ever found myself sharing a bed with. But we may have to research that question on our own.”

And hell yeah, they were kissing again.

The first time was all about testing each other’s limits and boundaries, and who was in control. Making sure neither would back down. Alex teased Henry, and Henry most deliciously put him in his place. Henry had given him an out, but Alex had pushed past it to prove he was all in. They were challenging each other, showing off, seeing how far they could take it. That was Alex’s thing, the confrontation, and the teasing, and the back and forth.

This time was different.

With the edge taken off his lust, Alex has more room in his brain for the details of the situation. How Henry nestles into his side, stroking his hair and kissing his jaw and stretching his long body against Alex with something that seems dangerously close to tenderness. And how much he likes it.

HENRY  
Henry is thinking about his father. 

Most young men don’t think about their dead movie star fathers whilst snogging the boy of their dreams, but there you go.

Henry was eighteen when his father died, but just seventeen when he was first diagnosed. Pancreatic cancer. His parents first told him, along with Philip and Bea, in the living room at Kensington where they had once played cribbage and watched his father’s old movies, groaning and covering their eyes every time he kissed some young Bond girl. 

His father was already thin, his eyes too bright. His mother was already withdrawing into herself, not meeting Henry’s eyes. Bea and Philip were already slipping away, Bea to drugs and parties and Philip to country weekends with appropriate peers, coordinated by Gran behind the scenes. 

Henry knew immediately everything was about to change. Even before he googled “survival rate pancreatic cancer” (20% for one year, 7% for five years—his father would get five months), he knew he would lose everything.

Unable to cope with his questions and need for comfort, his mother sent him on a ski trip to Switzerland with Philip and his uni friends. The cancer diagnosis was still top secret until Gran decided it was the right time to make a public announcement, probably not until his father’s lack of public appearances were noticed. Gran didn’t have much patience with illness or the associated outpouring of sympathy, especially for a son-in-law of whom she had never approved. 

So that was how Henry found himself at seventeen, suddenly facing an incomprehensible future and feeling hard and reckless. When his brother’s friend Reggie looked at him, he didn’t look away. When Reggie brushed up behind him in the hallway, he stood his ground. When Reggie slipped into Henry’s room that night with a bottle of whisky, Henry drank and let things happen to him.

Reggie hadn’t been especially kind, or gentle, and he didn’t answer any of Henry’s texts after the trip or come to his father’s funeral. So in that way he had been an excellent introduction to the life that Henry expected for himself. At least he had come back every night. At least he kissed Henry for a while first. 

Seventeen year old Henry had been running out of time, but even he didn’t know how quickly. Suddenly it was imperative to figure out all of the things he had buried about himself. Soon he would no longer have a father, so it was time to become a man. It was time to be a little wild, a little careless, to fight just a little against his stifling existence. 

That’s how he felt now, with Alex. He was rash and reckless and filled with urgency to seize on this one night together. While with Reggie he was testing something he had always suspected about himself, with Alex he was confirming something that he already knew. 

He is in love. So in love. And he has one night to get it all out of his system.

ALEX  
Alex is luxuriating. Henry is kissing his shoulders, his neck, his mouth. His lips are moving purposefully, with a plan and a pattern that Alex can’t fathom and doesn’t really care about except to idly wonder where they might go next. 

It’s kind of inevitable that kissing Henry makes Alex think about Liam. That was his only other time kissing a guy—unless you counted when he and Mario Alvarez barely kissed at the lacrosse championship party. God, had he really thought he was straight?

Anyway, kissing Liam had been...nice. It had been great. But it had also been secretive, and he always had to get himself drunk enough to let it all happen, in order to shut down the part of his brain that asked too many questions. Right now, with Henry, he was about 78% sober and not dealing with beer burps or the spins or the danger of rolling off Liam’s twin bed.

Kissing Liam had been a lot of humping and strangled moans and Alex pretending to be drunker than he was. When Liam would tangle his fingers into Alex’s hair and whisper, “Hey, what are you thinking?” Alex would say “Huh?” or “Fuck, I’m so drunk,” and pull Liam’s mouth back to his.

Christ, he is such an asshole.

Henry is focusing on Alex’s mouth now, his lips hot and soft. His big hands appreciatively explore the jut of Alex’s hip bone, the slightly rough skin on the small birthmark on his bottom rib, the delicate trail of hair leading down from his belly button. 

Alex feels Henry’s focus, like Henry is memorizing him. Henry’s strong fingers rake over his shoulders, the muscles in his arms, touching every inch. Henry’s eyes are shut, and even in the darkness Alex senses the set of his jaw. With Liam, part of him was always pretending that he wasn’t really there, that it wasn’t actually happening. But this was...fuck. This was intense.

Suddenly Alex’s hands are in Henry’s hair. He can’t help himself—he needs to hear Henry’s voice, to be told...what? That he’s pretty?

“Hey, what are you thinking?” he whispers.

HENRY  
What was he thinking? Christ. About how he misses his father; about how Reggie—now married to Martha’s cousin—tried to follow him into the bathroom at Philip’s wedding, and Henry gave him a look that would cut glass. About how Alex’s body is that perfect combination of hard muscles and soft skin, like steel covered in silk, except for his unforgivably lush bottom which is, cliches be damned, a ripe peach that Henry needs to bite.

What comes out is, “I’m thinking about you with your glasses on.”

Alex huffs with surprise. “You have some kind of Clark Kent fetish or something?”

“I’m not sure if you’ve earned comparison to my childhood crush.” Henry rolls onto his side, but keeps his hand on Alex’s jaw, lightly tracing where it meets his ear. “That night at Kensington, when I came to your room…”

“When you snuck into my room to steal my ice cream,” interrupts Alex.

Henry leans over and gives his earlobe a little nip. “Saucy. When I passed by your room to check on you and saw you in your lounge wear and your glasses, it...did something to me. It was like seeing you for the first time. You’ve always had some kind of defensive mechanism up whenever I was around. Always a glint in your eye and a sharp comment.”

“Hey, it’s just that…”

“And that was when I realized which one was the disguise.” Henry moves in to silence him with a kiss, and feeling Alex immediately lose his train of thought and melt into him, he lingers for an extra moment. He pulls back to look at Alex, who looks as surprised and vulnerable as he had that night with the Cornettos, even without his glasses. 

Henry continues. This was the only time that he and Alex would ever do this, and he feels as reckless as he had at seventeen, trying to live a lifetime before he lost his father. “That was the first time I thought you might ever let me get close to you.” He runs his thumb along Alex’s bottom lip and listens to his breath catch. “That was the first time I ever dared to imagine doing this”—he kisses the hollow at the base of Alex’s throat. “Or this”— he slides on top of Alex, returning to his wet mouth while one hand trails down to dig fingertips into his luscious arse. 

Alex gives a little moan as his hips twitch. 

Henry keeps murmuring between kisses. “I saw you. I knew you.” Alex moves underneath him, starting a slow rhythm and gripping Henry’s shoulders. “I knew you would let me in, you were so beautiful.” 

Alex gives a half sob, and Henry holds him tighter.

“I knew I could make you feel so good, make you happy.” Henry lets his strong hand settle where Alex wants, instinctively returning to the cadence and sensitive spots learned in the previous hour.

“I...I,” gasps Alex.

“Shhh, Alex,” says Henry soothingly. “Shhh. Let me give you what you need. Let me take care of you.”

ALEX  
Holy. Fucking. Shit.

If the first time was about exploring and testing and teasing, then this time is...well, it's about Henry’s words as much as his hands and mouth. Henry’s tender whispers making his chest ache with an exquisite pain that can only be soothed by Henry’s hands on his body. Making embarrassing whimpers because he has no words, but needs Henry to kiss him hard.

“Henry,” he sighs, apparently the only word he knows. So he says it again, “Henry Henry Henry.”

He remembers that night at Kensington, too. Henry had been wearing sweats and his hair was flattened on one side. But he hadn’t known, how could he have known, that Henry had seen him, really seen him that night.

Henry is everywhere all at once. He feels his mouth on his hip, his fingers in his hair and then on his stomach, lips one moment nuzzling his jaw then biting his inner thigh. He’s a blur, but Alex hears his voice, authoritative but gentle, reassuring and really fucking sexy.

“Alex, you are so beautiful right now. Thank you for letting me see you like this. I love how you look when I touch you.”

Alex starts to tremble. His body is reaching its limit, his brain about to detonate.

“Come for me now, love,” commands Henry.

Alex is shaking. The ache in his chest threatens to swallow him even as his body writhes in pleasure. But he feels Henry’s weight pressed against him, keeping him rooted to the earth as he shudders and explodes. He has never felt so seen, so safe. 

Alex realizes he is sobbing.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

HENRY  
Henry is perhaps surprised that he isn’t surprised to see Alex Claremont-Diaz weeping in his arms. He rolls onto his back, nestling Alex into the crook of his arm. He strokes and soothes, whispering, “It’s okay, Alex, I’ve got you.” He kisses the corners of his eyes and tastes the salt.

“Oh fuck,” says Alex between sobs. “Oh fuck, I’m sorry, it’s just that…”

“Don’t be sorry.”

Alex buries his face in Henry’s shoulder. “That’s never happened to me before.”

Henry wordlessly wraps his arms around Alex even tighter.

“I think I really like you,” whispers Alex.

“Me as well. I always have.”

“Fuck. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, love,” says Henry.

They hold each other in the dark, in the historic room full of heavy antiques. Henry feels the joy—and the gravity—of Alex’s declaration. He had been defiant, and reckless, and longed to be free for one night. But in the ultimate twist of fate, by daring to show Alex his love, he awoke something in Alex that he never even dreamed was there.

Maybe they could be happy, at least for a little while.

“Um, have you ever been to a polo match?” asks Henry.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Your kudos and comments mean the world.


End file.
